Food & Drink Searches in the US, Canada, Germany, Russia, Italy, France, Brazil, Japan and India

Today I looked at Google searches about food and drink collectively by a series of countries. What is more, I used the option to show trend lines for each year which should bring out seasonalities. I started with the US:



The two high points of the year were Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November) and Christmas. Next, Canada:



In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on a different date: the second Monday of October. This was reflected in the trend lines. Surely, Christmas will also be the gastronomical top in Germany?



Indeed. Note the more gradual buildup toward Weihnachten though. Also, Easter was becoming more pronounced here. That holiday follows a complicated set of rules involving a lunisolar calendar and fell in the Western rite of Christianity on different dates: April 11, 2004; March 27, 2005; April 16, 2006; April 8, 2007; March 23, 2008. Let's go to a prime representative of the Eastern rite of Christianity: Russia.



Primarily because the Eastern rite doesn't follow the Gregorian calendar but instead still uses the Julian one, their Christmases do not always coincide with the Western ones: April 11, 2004; May 1, 2005; April 23, 2006; April 8, 2007; April 27, 2008. We did see a small increase at that time in 2004, 2007 and 2008 but not in the other years. It seemed like Easter wasn't as big a deal as in the Western rite. Christmas trumped everything. Next, Italy:



This displayed a more "multipolar" seasonality: Christmas and Easter, sure, but also mid-February and more. I guess it goes to show that Italians like to celebrate on many occasions—good for them! How about the other stereotypical bon vivants, France?



Besides Christmas, a peak in mid-August also showed. But more interesting was that the search volume went up dramatically in March 2008 as compared with the previous years. Odd. Off to South America I went to investigate Brazil.



Easter was almost as important as Christmas for Brazilians. I wondered what the mid-June increase stood for. It turns out that June 12 is the Dia dos Namorados, a kind of Valentine's Day. Note the more or less increasing search volume through the years. How about Japan?



Even though this country isn't really much Christian, Yuletide was most noticeable in the seasonal trends. It has become kind of a secular, imported holiday. Second most important was early June which I wasn't able to link to any specific holiday or festivity. Does anybody have an idea? Finally, I did an analysis of India:



I couldn't observe any noticeable seasonal peaks in Google searches for food and drink. However, there was a remarkable peak in September 2007. Maybe this had to do with India winning the inaugural ICC World Twenty20 championship? I really don't know. Maybe somebody can help on this one too.

One more thing: I did a quick tally of the top 3 search terms in the analyzed countries, totaling all the occurrences:



Obviously, most people search the internet for recipes or for restaurants. Sushi occurred in the top 3 only in Russia (not Japan!), wine in Germany (not France!). Ramen though was only popular in Japan.

7-Day Top Searches in Germany, Brazil, the US, Australia and Japan

Using Google Insights for Search's Download as CSV feature, I made a spreadsheet of the top searches for the last 7 days in five countries. For reasons that are unclear to me, the data yielded the top 50 for Germany, Brazil and Australia but only the top 44 for the US and Japan. I established a list of all the unique search terms and made a stacked graph using the standardized values for each country. It's a little big as there's a very long tail, in other words, there isn't a lot of overlap.



I realize the graph is hard to read but Blogger somehow reduced the size. Here are the search terms with their respective total values:

1. youtube 375
   
2. yahoo 290
   
3. google 230
   
4. ebay 180
   
5. myspace 175
   
6. facebook 165
   
7. hotmail 130
   
8. msn 125
   
9. you tube 115
   
10. orkut 100
    
11. jogos 100
    
12. games 100
    
13. wikipedia 90
    
14. maps 70
    
15. gmail 60
    
16. my 55
    
17. craigslist 55
    
18. gmx 50
    
19. amazon 50
    
20. weather 45
    
21. mixi 45
    
22. dictionary 45
    
23. wetter 40
    
24. web 40
    
25. news 40
    
26. 2ch 40
    
27. 価格 40
    
28. test 35
    
29. 楽天 35
    
30. 地図 35
    
31. white pages 30
    
32. web.de 30
    
33. uol 30
    
34. telefonbuch 30
    
35. spiele 30
    
36. real estate 30
    
37. globo 30
    
38. bild 30
    
39. ニコニコ 30
    
40. yahoo mail 25
    
41. tradutor 25
    
42. terra 25
    
43. studivz 25
    
44. mapquest 25
    
45. cnn 25
    
46. baixaki 25
    
47. 天気 25
    
48. westpac 20
    
49. wer kennt wen 20
    
50. tv guide 20
    
51. schülervz 20
    
52. routenplaner 20
    
53. qantas 20
    
54. mobile 20
    
55. leo 20
    
56. hotmail.com 20
    
57. frases 20
    
58. 譬ｪ萓｡ 20
    
59. bebo 20
    
60. anz 20
    
61. ヤフー 20
    
62. yellow pages 15
    
63. yahoo.com 15
    
64. wkw 15
    
65. where is 15
    
66. walmart 15
    
67. vivo 15
    
68. utube 15
    
69. tre 15
    
70. telstra 15
    
71. target 15
    
72. spiegel 15
    
73. seek 15
    
74. red tube 15
    
75. optus 15
    
76. oi 15
    
77. nhk 15
    
78. nab 15
    
79. mensagens 15
    
80. icq 15
    
81. hi5 15
    
82. goo 15
    
83. freenet 15
    
84. firefox 15
    
85. espn 15
    
86. detran 15
    
87. db 15
    
88. commonwealth bank 15
    
89. claro 15
    
90. caixa 15
    
91. big day out 15
    
92. bank of america 15
    
93. asx 15
    
94. aol 15
    
95. 鄙ｻ險ｳ 15
    
96. 螟ｩ豌嶺ｺ亥 ｱ 15
    
97. ノーベル賞 15
    
98. vagalume 10
    
99. tse 10
    
100. trading post 10
     
101. t-online 10
     
102. the age 10
     
103. tchibo 10
     
104. runescape 10
     
105. receita federal 10
     
106. postbank 10
     
107. otto 10
     
108. o2 10
     
109. ninemsn 10
     
110. netbank 10
     
111. net 10
     
112. myspace.com 10
     
113. myspace layouts 10
     
114. msnbc 10
     
115. miniclip 10
     
116. mercado livre 10
     
117. meinvz 10
     
118. jogos online 10
     
119. jogos de meninas 10
     
120. jetstar 10
     
121. jappy 10
     
122. jal 10
     
123. ig 10
     
124. hoyts 10
     
125. home depot 10
     
126. herald sun 10
     
127. google maps 10
     
128. gmx.de 10
     
129. 驛ｵ萓ｿ逡ｪ蜿ｷ 10
     
130. dmm 10
     
131. dicionario 10
     
132. deutsche bank 10
     
133. dax 10
     
134. das Örtliche 10
     
135. currency converter 10
     
136. concursos 10
     
137. club penguin 10
     
138. bom 10
     
139. bol 10
     
140. bigpond 10
     
141. bate papo 10
     
142. barack obama 10
     
143. börse 10
     
144. au 10
     
145. aol.com 10
     
146. ana 10
     
147. americanas 10
     
148. afl 10
     
149. 大和生命 10
     
150. 繝九さ繝九さ蜍慕判 10
     
151. youtube.com 5
     
152. you tube.com 5
     
153. xnxx 5
     
154. webkinz 5
     
155. tv programm 5
     
156. tim 5
     
157. southwest airlines 5
     
158. schuelervz 5
     
159. photobucket 5
     
160. pandora 5
     
161. oi torpedo 5
     
162. nikoniko 5
     
163. my space 5
     
164. msn.com 5
     
165. messenger 5
     
166. letras de musicas 5
     
167. kboing 5
     
168. jra 5
     
169. itau 5
     
170. horoscopo 5
     
171. gyao 5
     
172. google.com 5
     
173. globo.com 5
     
174. g1 5
     
175. fernsehprogramm 5
     
176. facebook login 5
     
177. 貍ｫ逕ｻ鬢ｨ 5
     
178. deutsche bahn 5
     
179. cpz 5
     
180. cifras 5
     
181. caixa economica 5
     
182. bradesco 5
     
183. 遏ｳ逕ｰ譛ｪ譚･ 5
     
184. 邱呈婿諡ｳ 5
     
185. 菴仙ｷ晄\･萓ｿ 5
     
186. 荳画ｵｦ蜥檎ｾｩ 5
     
187. ユーチューブ 5
     
188. 繝ｦ繝九け繝ｭ 5
     
189. 繧｢繧ｲ繧ｵ繧ｲ 5
     
190. 繧ｬ繝ｳ繝\繝  00 5
     

The social networking sites, search, Wikipedia, ... the usual suspects are internationally Google-popular. I must admit I'm a little baffled by the number of people searching for "Google" in the Google search engine: maybe these came from in-browser search boxes? Yahoo mail and weather were only searched in the US. Only Australians typed in games a lot. There are more examples of interesting/puzzling details. Temporarily, the full-scale graph can be viewed here.

Yahoo vs. Google vs. MSN vs. AOL vs. Ask.com

According to Net Applications, the August 2008 global market share of internet search engines was as follows:

1. Google (79%)
   
2. Yahoo (12%)
   
3. MSN (5%; incl. Live Search)
   
4. AOL (2%)
   
5. Ask.com (1%)
   

I used Google Insights for Search to investigate their global Google-popularity:



It turned out that Yahoo was more popular than Google at least as far as people searching for something relating to these portals was concerned. I would guess that this may have something to do with the extra directory feature of Yahoo. In fact, MSN is about as searched for as Google. Note that Google is the only one to display a sudden sharp increase (mid-2005). It then surpassed MSN about mid-2006. Of course, I live in the US so I get a different impression than people in other countries. So I ran the trend analysis on a few individual countries. First, I took on the US:



Yahoo was more clearly in the lead and Google didn't show that sudden jump as much. MSN was weak and stayed that way. How about Germany?



Google jumped in the lead in mid-2005 and stayed ahead. How were things in France?



Contrary to its European neighbor Germany, France had Yahoo and even MSN ahead of Google. Now I turned to Asia: Japan.



Yahoo was totally in charge. Sure, Google bypassed MSN by the beginning of 2006 but was still way behind. AOL was insignificant. Finally, what about Brazil?



MSN managed barely to stay ahead of Yahoo and Google.

Cat vs. Dog vs. Horse in the US, the UK, Brazil, Japan and India

Today, a face-off between the three animals that are the most closely associated with humans since ancient times: cat, dog and horse. However, instead of the usual worldwide comparison, Google Trends also allows for zooming in on specific countries' search patterns. For starters, let's see what this gives for the US:


Scale is based on the average traffic of dog from United States in all years
cat 0.48
dog 1.00
horse 0.41

In the US, dog is twice as popular as the other two. Cat barely beats horse. How about the UK?


Scale is based on the average traffic of dog from United Kingdom in all years
cat 0.63
dog 1.00
horse 0.85

Lo and behold, horse is more Google-popular than cat in the UK! How about Brazil?


Scale is based on the average traffic of dog from Brazil in all years
cat 0.92
dog 1.00
horse 0.53

Through the four years, from a basically equal position horse declined in popularity while the stable dog at most has a slight edge over cat. Maybe Japan looks different too?


Scale is based on the average traffic of cat from Japan in all years
cat 1.00
dog 0.85
horse 0.25

Yes! Japan is most interested in neko a.k.a. cat. Last but not least [cliché alert], it's India's turn:


Scale is based on the average traffic of cat from India in all years
cat 1.00
dog 0.50
horse 0.30

Cat also dominates in India and what's more, it has an impressive seasonal peak at about New Year's. Surely, there must be an explanation : can anyone help me out?